'Seeing Things' Update

I found my copy of Seeing Things. It's a more substantial book than I remembered, 10 x 11 x 1/2 inches. The reproductions are excellent, maybe not perfectly accurate, but exquisite. They impart a sense of the original print-as-object. The pictures come from across the entire history of photography, from 1844 to 1993, the year before the anniversary and two years before the publication date of the book. Jeffrey Fraenkel himself, in the  says, "...Our net has been cast wide over the history of photography...rather than choose images to illustrate a specific theme, I decided simply to select pictures that somehow seemed right, and let those pictures define their own subject. It soon became apparent that while the photographs were not linked by any common thread of interest in dramatic incident, famous people, or sublime landscapes, they nevertheless shared a recurrent tone. What bound them together was the sense of serious looking."

That's certainly not wrong, but it doesn't quite hit what appeals to me about the book. There's a certain astringent, distanced taste in play, that collectively gets at the mystery-behind-the-real that certain pictures possess. And I'm sure one thing I liked about it is that the pictures wander through their progression stepping around the greatest hits and familiar old warhorses we've all seen before. When the book came out, only about 14 of the 50 pictures were already familiar to me, and none of the 14 suffered from overexposure, no pun intended. Many of the photographers are well known, but some aren't, and most of the famous names are represented by lesser-known pictures. There's no "Migrant Mother," but there's a much lesser-known Dorothea Lange that looks like it might have been taken by Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand on their trips across America. Speaking as we were of Brutalism and béton brut, raw concrete, I stared for quite some time at the eerie monument by Bernd & Hilla Becher, a concrete water tower. This one, although it's curious how much more power it has in ink on a page than on a screen.

And by the way, I was wrong—the cover picture is not a "found snapshot" but is listed as "Attributed to Charles Breed," 1915. It's one of only a few in the book with much in the way of action or movement going on. Many of the others have a sense of brooding quietude and stillness; and even the Charles Breed picture has a sense of mystery and strangeness in it, rather than play, as if she's stepping off a solid foundation into the void, or about to smother with her body the distant sailing ship that morphs between the real and the suggestion of a toy. On previous viewings I had completely missed the second child at the very bottom of the frame. It's a marvelous picture, one you could hardly think to take on purpose.

I enjoyed getting the book down and giving it a slow and, yes, serious look again. I need to do that more often with my photobooks—spend more time looking at them again. Why else have them? It's a nice way to meditate.

And by the way, still recommended—doubly so, now that I've seen it again.

Mike

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Comments

[Andrew B]

Convinced me. Ordered a copy via your links. Thanks

[John Camp]

Two personal comments.
I don't understand why anyone looks at the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher, which seems to me to be done without any regard whatsoever for aesthetics or even decent exposure. I perhaps overstated the exposure thing.
Brutalist architecture, in my opinon, is well-named: it's brutal to look at, and I'm pretty sure it's brutal to live in, judging from the results of low income housing in Great Britain, which is where it really "flowered," if that's the appropriate word. Just because something is made out of concrete, though, doesn't mean it has to be ugly, and recently I read an old magazine in a used book store that claimed several interesting buildings as Brutalist simply because they're built of concrete. They're not. Saarinen used concrete in ways that are quite striking, and not Brutalist in any way. Concrete is simply a building material, and can look as airy as glass.

[T. Edwards]

Mike - my copy arrived today and it's excellent.

Thank you for the heads up!